Earth may have been warm enough to support life more than 3 billion years ago, even though the Sun was 20 per cent dimmer than today, a new study has found.
Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder say all that was required to sustain liquid water and primitive life on Earth during the Archean eon 2.8 billion years ago were reasonable atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts believed to be present at the time and perhaps a dash of methane.
The key to the solution was the use of sophisticated three-dimensional climate models that were run for thousands of hours on CU’s Janus supercomputer, said doctoral student Eric Wolf, lead study author. “It’s really not that hard in a three-dimensional climate model to get average surface temperatures during the Archean that are in fact moderate,” said Wolf.